


dream on, dreamer

by CamouflageCamel



Category: Doctor Sleep - Stephen King, IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, Gen, M/M, Not Beta Read, Psychic Abilities, What Is This? A Crossover Episode?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2020-11-02 13:22:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20760671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CamouflageCamel/pseuds/CamouflageCamel
Summary: In a slightly different world, the Losers are trying their best to move on after the previous summer's return to Derry. An unfortunate turn of events proves to complicate this. Dan Torrance is trying his best to uncomplicate it.





	1. September 2017

##### September 2017

Bill is midway through a passage that he’s been struggling with for two days when the phone rings.

“Nope,” he says to his word processor. His thoughts spiral out from his mind like silken thread, spun up in the loom of his fingers against the keys and woven into a somewhat-cohesive narrative as the words appear on screen. He’s on a roll. He’s on _ fire_. This train stops for no one, not even Bill himself: he hasn’t taken a bathroom break in about six hours.

The phone stops ringing, but Bill hardly notices, because Bill isn’t really present. He’s Abel Cartwright, part-time craft services employee and full-time medium, trapped in the throes of a deadly mystery that promises to leave his life forever changed. Abel’s at the fountain at the center of the abandoned town’s been chosen as the location of the next big summer blockbuster. He’s become aware of a sinister force that once drove the locals to drown themselves in the fountain’s shallow waters. Abel peers down at the murky brown liquid, its surface both perfectly reflective and utterly disgusting. It has the stench of turbid, rotten sewer (Bill makes a note to dredge up some traumatizing memories for the sake of better adjectives, here) and bloated, feculent bodies (unfortunately, recall will probably help here, too). At the corner of his eye, Abel catches something shifting underneath the water. He leans in, closely, and

“_Bill,” _Audra says. She’s sitting right in front of his desk, now: he lifts his eyes and locks them with hers. She snorts and lifts her own eyes to the ceiling, though it's an expression with some tired affection in it. “On a roll?” she asks.

“Yep,” he answers, and almost dives back in, except Audra is sliding a phone across the table and next to his hand. It’s not his own phone, he realizes. “Beverly’s been ringing for ten minutes,” Audra explains. “When you wouldn’t pick up, she called me instead. I think it’s pretty important, roll or not.”

Bill swallows once, and nods. He lifts the phone to his ear and says, “B-Bev? What’s up?”

Beverly’s voice, normally even-tempered and strong, is higher, almost reedy with panic. “Bill? Thank fuck. Listen, something’s wrong with—”

“Eddie,” he finishes. He doesn’t know how he knows. He just knows.

Bill swallows again, and his eyes make contact with Audra’s own. She looks at him for a long second, and then spins his laptop so that it’s facing her. “I’ll book a ticket now,” she tells him. And then she blinks back surprise, because Bill holds up two fingers in response. “Tickets,” she corrects herself, and then she focuses on the screen in front of her.

“Tell me e-ev-ev… tell me everything,” Bill says into the phone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! The chapters do get longer as the story continues. I may consolidate everything into one chapter at the end, depending on how things work out.


	2. September 2017

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In some ways, Ben is almost astounded that they all managed to get through a full year without something going terribly wrong.

##### September 2017

In some ways, Ben is almost astounded that they all managed to get through a full year without something going terribly wrong.

Of course, he’s not going to tell Beverly this. He’s the optimist in their relationship. Instead, he calls Stan while Bev dials and redials Mike, who’s in London (England or Ontario) or maybe in Rome (Alabama or Italy) or some other location that’s killing his cell reception. As for Stan, he rarely picks up when they call. It’s really only Eddie who can consistently get him to answer, but— that’s not really an option right now. Beyond birthday calls and holiday greetings, Stan’s kept himself just out of reach throughout the course of the entire year. Ben finds himself sorely missing his friend’s calm, orderly presence on a day-to-day basis. And now he won’t even pick up his damned phone.

“You’ll probably get my texts before you listen to this,” Ben says to Stan’s voicemail box, “but there’s something happening to Eddie. We came up to visit him; had a night out, a few drinks.” He curses internally: Stan doesn’t need the whole fucking play-by-play, he reminds himself. “Anyway,” he continues, “we all went to bed last night, and now he won’t wake up. I’m following him to the hospital now. Bev’ll text you the address.”

Then he clips his phone into position on the windshield of their rental and puts the car in reverse. Bev is already far ahead, riding with Eddie in the ambulance that had pulled away from the curb outside of their hotel minutes before. He doesn’t have the advantages of a siren or flashing red lights to help part Manhattan’s mid-morning rush hour (“No one ever drives here,” Eddie had said with a laugh, just last night, “because of all the traffic.”), and so he struggles through the stop-start congestion for twenty minutes, cursing when he just misses what seems like every fucking light.

He strides into Tisch Hospital’s emergency wing about twenty minutes after seeing the ambulance peel away from the curb outside of their hotel. Bev, who’s occupying an uncomfortable-looking vinyl chair in a row of uncomfortable-looking vinyl chairs against the back wall, immediately jumps up and heads toward him.

“The EMTs were saying that everything looked normal except his blood pressure, which is a little low. They’re taking him for an MRI right now. It could maybe be intracranial pressure, or something like it.”

Ben nods absently. The paramedics could have told them that Eddie grew antlers and it wouldn’t have mattered at this moment, because all Ben hears is that he’s still not awake. “Did you get Bill?”

Bev responds with a nod of her own. “He and his wife are flying in. They should be here tonight. Did you get Stan?”

“No, but I left him a message and a dozen increasingly panicky texts, so. I’m pretty sure he’s got the idea.”

Bev nods, and then slumps into a nearby chair so quickly that Ben almost jumps. A woman, waiting a few seats away from them, actually does jerk upward in his seat, and then favors them with a tired glare before settling back down.

Ben slides into the chair next to Bev, careful to do it gently, and wraps one arm around her shoulders. She’s stiff, with her chin drawn down toward her chest, and she’s shuffling her phone between her hands. Somehow, she seems to find enough energy for a wan smile before settling into his side.

They sit in silence for a short while. Ben watches two women rush in through the revolving doors, one bleeding profusely from her right arm. Seconds later, a group of paramedics speed past with a gurney; Ben doesn’t pay attention long enough to see what’s wrong or where they’re going. Instead, he lets his gaze travel around the room, taking in the shifting sunlight that passes through the automatic doors and bounces off the tile, sending a scattering of specular highlights across the wide lobby.

It’s a great day outside. The sun is climbing steadily, and the nearly cloudless sky promises an uninterrupted afternoon of late-summer light. The temperature is perfectly pleasant, and there’s almost no humidity. It was nice outside when they first went after It, too, Ben thinks. And the very last time, maybe. He wonders if the weather will ever be thematically appropriate for the bullshit situations they keep getting thrust into.

Twenty minutes must pass before Bev asks, “Did you get Richie?”

Ben feels his stomach do an unsettling flip, like someone put sneakers in a dryer that’s been inconveniently relocated to the center of his torso. “I thought you called him?” he says, hating the upward inflection of uncertainty that creeps into his voice at the last moment. “I’ll do it now.”

He knows that out of all of them, Richie will be the one who’ll take the news the hardest. And as much as this situation scares him, too, Ben is more than ready to spare Bev any pain the conversation might bring. She’s lived a lifetime of hardship: no need to pile on any more, if Ben can help it.

But Bev shakes her head slowly. The expression on her face shifts to grim determination. “I’ll do it,” she says, because she’s always been a fighter, and she’ll take on any battle if it means that her friends don’t have to fight one. And that’s something Ben _ can’t _ fight her on, because he’s the last person on Earth who would tell Beverly Marsh how and when to pick her own battles.

Bev grips her phone tightly for a few moments, staring hard at the screen, before unlocking it and pulling up Richie’s contact information. She allows Ben to interlace his fingers with her free hand, a singular point of comfort between them, and then dials.


	3. August 2017

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “People generally sleep when they get tired,” Richie glibly suggests. “Have you tried that, maybe?”

##### August 2017

Eddie calls Richie up the day after Comedy Central announces him as the roastmaster for their Jimmy Fallon special.

“Is this it?” Eddie asks, after they’ve gotten their weekly updates out of the way. “Are they all finally going to find out you’re not funny? I’ve been waiting my whole goddamned life for this.”

“Keep waiting,” Richie says, grinning into the phone. “Much like Godot, that moment will never arrive.”

“How theatrical of you,” Eddie drawls, sarcastic. “High school literary knowledge isn’t going to get you laid, dumbass, so stop trying.”

“It worked on your mom, so I think I’m doing alright.”

A snort sounds over the phone. “SparkNotes-level references don’t work on anyone. So, at the roast,” he says, their conversation flowing smoothly from topic to topic as much as it ever does, “are you going to slap the desk and laugh every time someone starts making a joke, or is that too on-the-nose?”

Richie considers it for a bit. “Maybe a little overdone,” he admits, “but that idea’s not half bad. Maybe only, like, 30% bad.”

“Well,” Eddie says, in a rare moment of praise, “I guess there’s a reason why you get paid to do the comedy shit, and I get paid to do a million iterations of the Fight Club car formula.”

“The reason being that I would never willingly choose a career made for actual robots and octogenarians.”

“The reason is that you never fucking learned how to do math.” Eddie yawns, then: it’s a loud, jaw-cracking thing that takes a few long seconds to pass.

“Burning the midnight candle at both ends, huh?” Richie asks, just to piss Eddie off: phrasal malapropisms are like nails on a chalkboard to him. “You getting enough sleep, Eds?”

Eddie’s quiet for a while, long enough for the jovial air of their conversation to fade, just a little. “Eds?” Richie repeats, cautiously. He tries to keep his concern out of his voice (he’s never been super great at sharing his feelings, and why start now?), but some of it seeps in, anyway.

“‘mfine,” Eddie says, eventually. Another yawn interrupts his next sentence. “J...just tired a lot, these days.”

“People generally sleep when they get tired,” Richie glibly suggests. “Have you tried that, maybe?”

_ “‘Have I tried that’, _ he says, like I’m a goddamned idiot, what the fuck,” Eddie mumbles under his breath. Then, louder: “Yes, fucker, I’ve been getting ten hours a day and I still feel like shit. You tellin’ me you’re doing just fine? There’s no fucking way— not after what we’ve been through.”

And there it is: the elephant in the room, the silent interloper in all of their conversations. What they’ve been through is a topic that’s so large, so all-encompassing, that it’s almost a struggle _ not _ to talk about it constantly. It’s exacerbated by the fact that there are only six other people in the world who really _ get _ it, and that whole aforementioned problem Richie has with sharing makes it difficult to approach anyone with his issues. Still, though: it’s Eddie. He can at least make an effort, right?

Richie takes a deep breath, and lets his exhale take some of the tension with him, like some of his old improv classes taught him. He uses the moment to organize his thoughts, and then says, hesitantly, “It’s usually the opposite for me.”

A long pause follows. “What?” Eddie says.

“Sleep. I’m running on fumes, to be honest. Dreams—” (nightmares, really) “-get me up every other night, and then it’s tough to get back to sleep. I think I’m averaging four hours a night these days, so if you could spare your extra two, I’d really appreciate it. And, I mean, that’s not even bringing up the voices...”

He chuckles nervously, feeling a little raw, a little exposed. As hard as it is to talk about that summer (and last summer), it’s almost harder to talk about his own reaction to it. Richie doesn’t do ‘personal’, unless he’s buffered by a stage and a crowd and an even layer of levity slathered all over it. Even with the Losers, it’s hard to be truthful, because they’re essentially a part of him, and Richie’s always been great at lying to himself.

A silence spreads between them, deep as the quarry and wide as the distance between them, with Richie in Los Angeles and Eddie in New York. And suddenly: a snore, soft and almost gentle.

“Eddie,” Richie starts, and then he stops, caught between laughing, crying and screaming. “Eddie Kaspbrak, are you fucking sleeping?!”

Another snort blares across the line, this time as the sound of abrupt return to consciousness. “_Shit! _ Shit. Oh, fuck, you scared the shit outta me.” Eddie coughs, and then continues. “What were we talking about? What were you saying?”

“Oh my God,” Richie says, finally settling on laughter, because if he starts crying, he’ll probably never stop. “Please go to sleep. It’s almost midnight here, which means it’s what-the-fuck-o’clock where you are. Go to bed before you get so sleep-deprived that you actually turn into the dude from Fight Club and start blowing up buildings.” 

“I’ll start with yours,” Eddie mutters, but it’s good-natured enough. “And _ ‘whatever-the-fuck-o’clock’? _ It’s three fucking hours, don’t you know how to add? Jesus, what did I say about your math skills, huh? Non-existent.”

Eddie yawns again, cutting himself off mid-tirade, and switches gears. “I’m done, man: can’t stay up much longer than this.” His voice is gradually slurring, words running together into a rant that would be incomprehensible if Richie didn’t know him so well. “Peace out. Love you, asshole.”

With that, the dulcet tones of Eddie’s deep, slumbering breaths begin to sound over the line. He hasn’t even ended the call, Richie realizes, and the thought makes him smile at the phone.

“Love you too, moron,” he says, and means it in more ways than one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Fight Club building scene.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHKlfGq3bOA) Spoilers for Fight Club, obviously.  
[Here’s a supercut](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqUIXIH2laA) of Jimmy Fallon fake-laughing and table-slapping.


	4. May 2017

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We’re not having this discussion.”

##### May 2017

Daniel Anthony Torrance lives an exceedingly ordinary life, and this is a fact of which he is proud.

He looks after patients, sits with the dead, visits his family and friends. He attends his weekly AA meeting, he finishes a lot of books, and he even starts learning to play the guitar. His life, all things considered, is pretty damned good.

This, unfortunately, is a fact of which he finds difficult to convince his niece.

“Okay, but really,” Abra says. She waggles her eyebrows at him, and Dan would have laughed if he weren’t caught halfway between indignant and mortified. “Was it last year? The year before that?”

“We’re not having this discussion,” Dan says in response. He stands from his seat on the slope at the edge of the Stones’ backyard, brushes some errant scraps of nature off of the back of his jeans, and watches a breath of spring breeze take the grass sailing off into the river below them. “I’m pretty sure your mom still thinks I’m some kind of predator. I’m not in any hurry to escalate the situation.” A pause, then, and a thought flashes through his mind like lightning, horrifying but realistically possible. “Unless you want—”

_ (the talk) _

Abra recoils. “Uh, no thanks,” she says, holding up both hands at shoulder height, palms outward, as if to physically push the idea away from her. “No offense, Dan, but the last thing I want to do is learn about sex from anyone who’s actually related to me. Momo’s version was pretty much just ‘don’t’. Plus, I have the internet.”

Dan takes a deep breath, drags one hand over his face, and tries not to think about how accurate or inaccurate the internet might be. Instead, he thinks very carefully about the word ‘sex’ being locked inside of an old-fashioned steamer trunk, then thrown over a tall cliff and into a raging surf below. “That,” he says, “is exactly how much I want to talk about what I may or may not be doing in my own bed,” Dan says. “Could you please just talk about your physics class again?”

Abra pouts. At seventeen, she’s almost entirely too old for it, but the expression still takes Dan back to that first moment he met her, thirteen years old and equal parts angry, terrified, and brilliant all at once. “It’s not that I’m interested in your sex life, Uncle Dan,” she says. She even makes a face at the idea of it. “It’s that I keep wondering why you’re never with anyone. Don’t you get lonely?”

Dan looks at her, and tries to think about how to describe a nomadic life, nameless streets, and roads rushing past bus windows at midnight. He thinks of an echoing emptiness in his mind, suddenly filled with visions and fears and ghosts, and a cold night spent at the mouth of a storm drain, moments after his lowest low. He tries to articulate his loss, his apathy, his pain blunted by the deceptive, liquid comfort of the bottle, and how everything that he’s gained has taken him so far from that nightmarish existence that it almost seems like a different life. He tries to find the words to say that he hasn’t felt alone since finding Frazier, and then he remembers that he’s not even alone right now, not in his head, and so he doesn’t have to say anything at all.

With a shuddering gasp, Abra throws her arms around his middle and squeezes tight. She chokes back a sob, but the levee breaks, and then she weeps for a few moments, her exhalations quiet and tight. Dan curls his arms around her, blinks back the tears gathering at the edges of his own eyes.

Abra calms down after some time. She pulls back and swipes at her face with the sleeve of her taupe-colored sweater, and steadfastly ignores the wet spots and the makeup stains she’d left on her uncle’s flannel shirt. “Okay, I get it,” she says. “You’re not alone. Or lonely. I don’t really get the difference, but I get it.”

Dan quirks her a half smile, and carefully brushes one stray lock of hair back behind her ear before giving the top of her head an affectionate pat. “I already have everything I’ve wanted,” he says. “What more could I possibly ask for?”


	5. June 2017

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here is someone else who knows what it’s like to be a fuck-up among fuck-ups.

##### June 2017

“And then she jumped a turnstile to avoid getting served the divorce papers,” Eddie finishes.

“Wow,” Stan says. He tries to imagine Myra running, let alone vaulting an obstacle (or voluntarily getting on a subway, for that matter), and finds that he can’t. “I had no idea she was that limber.”

“She’s really not,” Eddie says, and his lips quirk upward at one corner, the beginnings of a wry smile developing. The divorce has been a long, drawn-out thing, and it’s starting to show on Eddie’s face: the bags under his eyes could probably carry a week’s worth of groceries for a family of four. “But she got through, somehow. Took the train two stops before she couldn’t stand it anymore, then got off at Union Square and tried to hide in a Duane Reed. The process server found her buying a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of hand sanitizer. She’s still trying to bill me for that, by the way, six months after the fact. _ ‘Emotional distress’, _she calls it.”

Stan is emotionally distressed just hearing about it, so he can only imagine how Eddie feels. “Do you think it’ll be done soon?” he asks. He hopes. He thinks— no, he _ knows _ that Eddie’s earned the right to be happy, after everything he’s been through.

Stan’s gaze sinks downward, to the dregs of his coffee, and then his hand in a gentle grip on the handle; at his wedding ring. He doesn’t deserve Patty, he knows, but somehow, she doesn’t seem to mind that fact. The events of the past year should have scared her off, but against all odds, she’s still with him. If Eddie can break away from the spiral of discontent his marriage has become (or maybe, that it’s always been), and find the same kind of joy that Patty brings Stan, well… Eddie deserves that much. More than Stan does, for sure.

“Stanley,” Eddie says, and Stan looks up to find his friend scowling deeply at him. “You’re probably thinking some sad shit right now, and you need to stop.”

He reaches forward, then, grips Stan’s hand. The hand, he’s just realized, that is curled around his other wrist, and pressing against the hidden evidence of his weakness. Underneath his cardigan and his pressed button-down shirt lay scars that Patty still doesn’t understand— that run much deeper than skin and muscle. He ignores the flash of memory _ (Eddie, looking at the entrance to his apartment, an immense dread building deep in his chest and threatening to overflow) _ and focuses on the now, on the present, like his therapist has instructed him to do.

“Sorry,” Stan says eventually, feeling the shame burn against his cheeks. “It’s just…”

Eddie looks at him. “Nah,” he says. “No apologizing.” He squeezes Stan’s wrist tight just once. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Stan: I know what it’s like, to be so afraid that you can’t see a way forward. No one blames you for what you did.”

_ I blame me_, Stan doesn’t say. It won’t do him much good. And this meeting isn’t supposed to be about his insecurities, anyway. He’s up in New York to complete an audit for one of his clients, and with Eddie only a few subway stops away, it seemed obvious enough to meet up and discuss their current state of affairs. Not literal ones, of course: Patty’s The One for Stan, and Eddie’s probably not the cheating type.

He is, however, the only other Loser Stan feels like he can speak to on an equal level. After Eddie had shared how he’d been frozen with fear in the house on Neibolt, and nearly gotten Richie killed because of it, Stan had felt a shameful sort of camaraderie. _ ‘Here is someone else who knows what it’s like to be a fuckup among fuckups’_, he’d thought, guiltily, and he’d almost been sick immediately after it’d crossed his mind.

Realistically, he knows that none of them hold it against him, and that the absence of his fear made the remaining Losers stronger, but there’s no way he can look them in the eye. At least, not right now. Not Ben, not Bev, not Mike. Not Bill, who he’d _ promised _, or Richie, who’d shown up when it really mattered. But Eddie understands what it’s like to fail. So Stan talks to him, and gets updates from the other via group emails and texts, and the gnawing sense of incompleteness he feels isn’t quite sated, but it’s manageable.

“Thanks,” Stan says, instead of all of that.

Eddie shrugs one shoulder. “No problem,” he says. And then, in an abrupt change of topic: “How did you know that you were in love with your wife?”

Stan’s heart nearly skips a beat. “Jesus, what a segue.”

“As a Jewish person, are you allowed to drop J-bombs?”

“We’re encouraged to,” Stan says, sarcastic. "Nothing like casual blasphemy to get the gentiles all fussy." To the question, he answers: “I can’t really say exactly when it happened, except…”

Except he can, surprisingly. “Okay, well... we met at a party,” he begins, “when we were in college. She says she knew she wanted to marry me by the end of the night. I think I realized it when she came back to the party house the next day with a bottle of water, some Advil, and a bagel, woke me up from where I’d passed out on a couch, and kicked me out before I missed a midterm.”

Eddie smiles. “I would like to meet Mrs. Uris one day,” he says. “She sounds pretty cool.”

“She _ is _ cool,” Stan says, returning the smile with one of his own. “Definitely cooler than me, that’s for sure. But it feels different for everyone, I think. Love, that is. Why do you ask?” Stan thinks he already knows why, but there’s no harm in having Eddie explain his thoughts out loud. It might even help him. 

The man in question slumps back against the wooden frame of his seat and crosses his arms loosely. His own coffee sits in front of him, untouched but for a single sip. Stan hadn’t even had the chance to give him an inquiring look before Eddie had rattled off a rant about restaurant washing machines being a cesspool of disease. Then he’d explained, somewhat embarrassed, that he was between therapists at the moment. Stan, who had gone through four before finding a doctor he was comfortable enough with, could sympathize.

“I’m just trying to figure things out,” Eddie starts. “I think… I think Myra loves me a lot. I’ve always thought I did, too. But I’m beginning to realize that neither of us really understood what ‘love’ is actually like.”

“Well.” Stan wavers briefly before deciding that there’s no use sugar-coating it. “The only example you had was your mother.”

“And you guys,” Eddie says easily, “but I didn’t even remember that until last summer. So I’d had this idea in my head about what things were supposed to be like, when you’re in love, but it turns out it’s completely fucking wrong because all of my adolescent development of self— the actual fucking moment that I developed a sense of self-worth and pushed back against my mother— got deleted by a shitty muder clown.” Eddie looks at him, his eyes a little too bright, and maybe a little wild. “Do you ever think about that?” he asks. “How the hell did we become functional adults when we had basically zero memories of personal growth after we left that goddamned town? How crazy is that?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call myself functional,” Stan says wryly, holding up both arms to indicate his hidden scars, “but I see your point.”

_ “Stan.” _

“I’m joking, I’m joking. So, you were talking about love.” 

Eddie eyes him, wary, but continues. He seems almost eager to get his thoughts off of his chest and out into the air. “We’re… we feed each other’s neuroses, sort of. Myra’s got her own issues about how she expects love to feel, and they’re about as bad as mine. It’s like a negative feedback loop. And after going back to Derry, I realized that the only way either of us can be happy is to break that loop.”

“She doesn’t see it that way,” Stan says, with the tone of a question but the certainty of a statement.

Eddie shakes his head, agreeing. “Of course not. And I’m kind of unilaterally making a decision that affects both of us, which is shitty, sure, but— I can’t do this anymore, Stan.” He sighs, a ragged, worn exhale, and the shadows under his eyes suddenly seem even more pronounced. “I don’t care about the money, really. Hell, I _ want _ her to be taken care of, financially. But I can’t be _ with _ her, not anymore. Not after I’ve remembered everything.”

Stan takes a long sip of his coffee and maintains eye contact with Eddie as he does so. _ ‘Not after he’s remembered a certain someone’ _ is what he really means, but Eddie’s too chicken to say it. Stan knows a thing or two about that, though, so he’s not about to be a hypocrite and tell Eddie to man up.

So he says: “How’s Richie?”

A strange look passes across Eddie’s face, as if he’s not sure whether to be suspicious or sociable. He settles on the former after some time. “What a subtle segue, Stan,” he deadpans. “Why don’t you call him and see for yourself?”

Touché. Even the thought of calling up one of the other Losers fills Stan with a deep sense of self-loathing. But Eddie’s just deflecting, and Stan knows exactly how to deal with that. He folds his arms outward and holds his hands palm up: a completely unconvincing _ ‘who, me?’ _ gesture. “We’re really not going to talk about what’s happening?” he asks.

“Nothing’s happening,” Eddie mumbles. “The guy comes out and, what, you think he’s suddenly going to jump his male friends? Not cool, man.”

“Do you have to wait until the ink dries?” Stan asks, blatantly ignoring Eddie’s transparent effort to shame him out of having this discussion. He rests one elbow on the table and props his chin in one hand, cocking his head to one side. “Does Trashmouth Tozier have objections to sleeping with a married man?”

“_Oh my God, _ can we _ not?” _ Eddie exclaims, much to the surprise of the patrons sitting closest to them. He ignores the sudden attention, though, and squeaks out, “I’m not— he’s not…”

“I’m pretty sure he’s…” Stan purposefully trails off, letting Eddie’s own intentionally-left-blank space fill his own. “And we both already know that you’re exclusively sexually attracted to trainwrecks— apologies to Myra— regardless of gender, so I think that just about covers it.”

Eddie hides his face in his hands. “This conversation is over,” he says, voice muffled. “Stan, you are _ not _ The Man. Not at all.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Stan says, and takes another sip of his coffee.

**Author's Note:**

> Literally only posting this so that my draft doesn't get deleted LOL.


End file.
